Driving a motor vehicle is a relatively tedious, repetitive, time consuming (about 250 hours annually for an average commuter according to KPMG report on “Self-driving cars: The next revolution”, 2012) and costly (in terms of manpower) task. About 93% of car accidents are caused by human error, which also renders driving motor vehicles a hazardous task. Car accidents annually claim thousands of casualties and result in tremendous costs (a few hundred billion dollars every year according to the KPMG report) associated with hospitalization, medical treatment and care, and car damages.
Robotic driving systems are being developed for replacing human drivers for various different tasks and applications, such as, for testing vehicle performance, for military operations, and suchlike. The solutions proposed heretofore are usually expensive to implement and very difficult to license/authorize for operating land vehicles.
Some automated driving systems are known from the patent literature, as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,742,720, 5,172,589, 5,270,628, 5,363,027, 5,394,743, 5,816,106, 5,821,718, 7,628,239 and 8,051,936, for example. These automated driving systems, however, require a human operator for providing control and instructions to the system, in order to drive the vehicle along a predetermined track/path, and are not designed to provide a universal platform that can be used with any land/motor vehicle.